We trace our origins to the early nuns and monks of the Middle Eastern deserts, who sought to live the Gospel of Christ wholeheartedly. St. Benedict (480-543) distilled his Rule from this living tradition for those who gathered around him seeking a way of life that would lead them to God.
The Rule caught the tenor of the western monastic spirit so effectively that it gradually displaced older Rules to become the most widely observed of monastic rules in Europe and, through the missionary outreach of Benedictine women and men, spread to other parts of the world as well.
Our Motherhouse, Abtei St. Walburg in Eichstatt Germany
First sisters who formed the Community in Boulder.
Our patroness, St. Walburga (710-779) herself participated in the missionary thrust that carried Benedictine monasticism from the flourishing monasteries of Anglo-Saxon England to the continent. Her relics and memory are preserved today at the Abbey of St. Walburg in Eichstätt, Bavaria, which was founded in 1035 to care for her shrine.
The founding nuns came from two older monasteries. One of them, the Abbey of St. Erentrud in Salzburg, popularly known as Nonnberg, is the oldest Benedictine monastery of women in the world. Monastic life has continued there without interruption since its founding at the beginning of the eighth century.
In 1935, three Sisters were sent from Eichstätt to a then-remote farm in Boulder, Colorado.
Times were troubled in Germany. Hitler's rise to power cast the shadow of threat over all religious foundations. Ironically, the Abbey of St. Walburg was itself thriving to such an extent that it could no longer house its growing population of nuns.
